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“Dr. Elsie Inglis was at the head of the many British women who went out to Serbia before the great retreat, to combat typhoid and nurse the sick and wounded. She remained under the enemy for several months with her staff to attend the Serbian wounded, and after she returned to Britain organised the Kosovo Day celebration.

In September 1916 she took out a unit of seventy-five women of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals to Russia and Romania, to be attached to the Serbian volunteer unit then fighting in Dobrudja, and she returned when the revolution in Russia broke out, but not until she had secured the transfer of the Jugoslav divisions from Odessa to Salonica. Arrived in Newcastle, exhausted by the work she had done since the beginning of the war, she died on November 26, 1917.”

“…the most important Serbian celebrations in Great Britain took place, that of Kosovo Day (May and June 1916), when hundreds of lectures were given over the whole country on June 28, commemorating the day of Kosovo, in English and Scottish schools and churches.

This was followed by a solemn service at St. Paul’s (July 7, 1916), one of the most impressive ceremonies during the war, m memory of the old Serbian Kosovo heroes and in honor of the Serbian soldiers and British doctors and nurses fallen in Serbia in the war. ” Ivan Ilic

Elsie Inglis (1864-1917)

Elsie Inglis was a Scots doctor and suffragist. She worked to set up the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.

She was born in Naini Tal, India, as her father worked in the Indian civil service. Her family later returned to Scotland and Elsie studied to become a doctor at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women that had been opened by Dr Sophia Jex-Blake.